In a message dated 01/26/2000 10:23:05 PM Eastern Standard Time, [log in to unmask] writes: << Can any of you that have some good ideas give me (and Jerry) a wish list of hive readouts you would like to have along with an explanation? We're thinking of an operation that has more than a few hives, but perhaps even a hobbyist with a few hives set up a long way from home could afford and benefit from such a system. >> Hello Allen, Well, I don't know if I have any "good ideas" but you've really got me thinking about this. It is possible to remotely monitor anything, if you are willing to spend the money. I happen to work in a public utility and we have a substantial investment in remote monitoring equipment, especially in sewer system pump stations (about 250 locations) and treatment plants. We have found that we save sufficient labor and avoidance of other expenditures by the use of it, such that, the equipment really does pay for itself over a span of time. It seems that we need to think about things which will reduce our labor or other costs. If we knew that everything was going well at a certain yard, we would not need to go there as often. If we used the weight of a hive as one of our monitoring parameters, we could discern a great deal. If we could see the hives increasing in weight and the computer had a database indicating the number of supers on a given hive, we would know our reserve capacity for storage and possibly avoid a trip. Perhaps a hive lost considerable weight in one day. Maybe it swarmed. If a hive was not increasing along with the others, we may have a mite problem or disease. We should go check it out. We might even be able to see an outstanding queen and be able to use our best producing hive as the one we would breed from. The queen would be in the database anyway and we would know where she came from and be able to go back to the source for more, if we weren't breeding our own. We could also measure the humidity inside the hive as well as the temperature and be able to see what these conditions were like in our best hives during peak production. We could measure many different parameters, all of which may give us data to allow us to see the results of phenomena occurring within our hives. A measurement of our combined parameters occurring at swarming events may yield a signature to help us avoid conditions which foster swarming. The apidictor is only one parameter which may help us in swarm prediction, but I'll bet there are others, in combination with the apidictor, which will help to nail it down more securely. I believe the computer is really going to be the interface of whatever hive happenings we decide to monitor. Dick Tracy really wasn't that far off of reality with his wrist communicators, now was he? Bob